DBA as a Service · UK
DBA as a Service: outsource database administration to UK senior DBAs.
24/7 monitoring, backup, tuning, patching and migration for SQL Server, Oracle, MySQL, PostgreSQL and Azure SQL. Senior DBAs in the UK, on-call when you need them.
No slide deck. Real DBA, real answers.
Production databases managed
Uptime across managed estates
Median MTTR for P1 incidents
UK senior DBAs on call
The reality
When your database becomes the bottleneck, the business slows.
We hear this from every IT Director who switches to a managed DBA service. Three problems, all solvable, and all draining engineering time and revenue you’d rather spend on growth.
Senior DBA hiring is impossible and expensive.
✕
London senior DBA salaries are \xc2\xa385K+. Hiring takes 4-6 months. Retention is brutal. By the time you onboard one, the last one is leaving for a better offer.
✓
Embed senior UK DBAs in 2 weeks. Fixed monthly fee.
Database downtime kills business operations.
✕
Every minute of DB downtime costs revenue, customers and trust. Yet your in-house team is firefighting Tier-1 tickets, not watching slow queries or backup chains.
✓
99.99% uptime SLA with proactive remediation and continuous monitoring.
Patching, backups and tuning always slip behind.
✕
Strategic work slides while DBAs firefight. Patch waves miss windows. Backups go untested. Performance degrades a query at a time, and no-one notices until prod stalls.
✓
Scheduled patching, tested DR, quarterly tuning baked in.
What you get
Four outcomes, one accountable DBA team.
Not a long features list: four operational outcomes that show up in your CFO’s monthly report and your CTO’s incident-free weekends. Every one of them runs from a UK Network Operations Centre.
24/7 proactive monitoring
24/7 watch
Predictive alerts catch slow queries, lock escalation and storage pressure before users feel it. UK-shifted DBAs on call every minute.
- rapid median phone answer
- AI auto-resolution for 23% of L1 volume
- Phone · portal · Teams · email · chat
99.99% uptime SLA
99.99% SLA
Multi-engine HA, tested failover, geographic redundancy. Documented runbooks for every failure mode your DBA team has seen.
- SOC integration on every L1 ticket
- ISO 27001 chain of custody · GDPR-ready
- Identity-aware access provisioning
Quarterly performance tuning
Quarterly tune
Index reviews, query plan analysis, statistics refresh, parameter sniffing fixes. Performance gains documented and benchmarked.
- 40% reduction in repeat-cause tickets
- Automated patch waves · 0 rollbacks
- Monthly trend & root-cause review
Disaster recovery you can trust
DR-ready
Backups verified weekly, restore-drills quarterly, RPO/RTO measured. ISO 27001 audit packs delivered as standard.
- Elastic per-user fee · agreed notice
- M&A & multi-region rollout playbooks
- Named service-delivery manager
How it works
Three phases from chaos to confidence.
Most DBA-as-a-service contracts start with a brittle handover and end with finger-pointing. Ours start with a documented audit, end with measurable performance gains, and run continuously in between.
01
Weeks 1 – 2
Audit
Inventory your DB estate, baseline current health, identify quick wins. You leave with a documented risk register and a named senior DBA assigned.
02
Weeks 3 – 6
Stabilise
Tighten backups, fix HA gaps, document runbooks, install monitoring. By week 6 your DB estate has zero unknowns and tested recovery.
03
Week 7 onwards
Optimise
Quarterly performance tuning, capacity reviews, version upgrades and migration planning. Monthly reports directly tied to your KPIs.
Why Transputec
Why our DBA service doesn’t behave like a typical contractor pool.
Most DBAaaS providers send you whichever contractor is free that day. We’ve spent 38 years building a senior UK DBA practice as a discipline, and it shows up in the four things our clients tell us they buy us for.
01 · Multi-engine expertise
SQL Server, Oracle, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Azure SQL.
One DBA team that knows every engine your business runs on. No swivel-chair handoff between vendor specialists. Single accountable owner per database.
02 · UK-based senior team
No offshoring. No L1 swap-out.
Senior UK DBAs with 8+ years average tenure, on UK PAYE, in our London office. The DBA you onboard with is the DBA who fixes your P1 at 3am.
03 · ISO 27001 controls
Compliance baked in, not bolted on.
Every access, change and patch logged under ISO 27001 controls. Audit packs on demand. GDPR, ICO and FCA reporting as standard with full traceability and governance assurance.
04 · Fixed monthly fee
Predictable cost, no per-incident bills.
Your CFO can predict next year’s DBA spend today. No per-ticket charges, no surprise call-out fees, no growth-tax surprises or unexpected budget spikes.
Our Services
Two DBA tiers, scaled to your needs.
Standard DBA as a Service
Our Standard DBA as a Service provides 24/7 remote monitoring for SQL Server, MySQL, PostgreSQL, and other platforms. You receive automated backups, restore testing, basic disaster‑recovery planning, routine maintenance, and security‑baseline reviews with basic hardening of accounts, roles, and permissions to keep performance stable and systems secure.
Premium DBA as a Service
Our Premium DBA as a Service adds advanced performance tuning, capacity planning, and proactive trend reporting for mission‑critical workloads. You gain support for high‑availability and clustered environments with tighter SLAs, so you see where costs and risks are growing and get faster, more resilient, and predictable database operations.
Trusted by
The IT teams running production on our DBAaaS.
Conservation · 1,200 seats
Global events · 800 seats
Property services · 2,100 seats
Also in this category
Managed IT Services
DBA as a Service is one pillar of our broader Managed IT Services offering. Explore the sibling services that round out a fully outsourced UK IT estate, or step back to the parent service for the bigger picture.
← Back to Managed IT ServicesFrequently asked
Answers to what UK IT leaders ask us most.
What is DBA as a Service (DBAaaS)?
DBA as a Service is outsourced database administration: monitoring, tuning, patching, backup, disaster recovery and migration handled by an external team of senior database engineers, billed on a fixed monthly fee. Transputec’s DBAaaS covers SQL Server, Oracle, MySQL, PostgreSQL, MariaDB and Azure SQL, with all work performed by UK-based senior DBAs under ISO 27001 controls. Industry guidance from the UK Government’s database evaluation framework informs our practice. For wider context, read our blog on data security in the cloud: who is responsible.
Which database engines do you support?
We support the full mainstream estate: Microsoft SQL Server (all editions, including Azure SQL), Oracle Database (Standard, Enterprise, Autonomous), MySQL, PostgreSQL, MariaDB, MongoDB and Amazon RDS. If you run a polyglot estate, you get one accountable DBA team across all engines, not a chain of vendor specialists. See a real-client DBAaaS migration in our database administration case study for Bristow Sutor.
How much does DBA as a Service cost in the UK?
UK DBAaaS pricing is typically per-database-per-month, with bands by engine, edition and HA tier. Standard SQL Server / PostgreSQL bands start around £450/DB/month for fully-managed business-hours cover, scaling to £1,200/DB/month for 24/7 mission-critical with quarterly tuning included. Enterprise Oracle estates are quoted bespoke. We publish indicative pricing in the Statement of Work before contract signature, with no per-ticket charges. For the cost framing behind a managed-service approach, read how much IT downtime really costs your business.
Can you migrate our databases between platforms?
Yes. We’ve migrated 50+ databases between engines, versions and clouds, ranging from SQL Server 2008 R2 to Azure SQL Managed Instance, Oracle 11g to PostgreSQL on AWS RDS, and on-prem MySQL to Aurora. Standard approach is a non-destructive parallel-run: source stays live, target gets validated, cutover happens on your schedule with full fall-back ready. Read how this worked in practice in our DBAaaS solution for Incisive Media.
How long does onboarding take?
Standard onboarding takes 2 weeks from contract signature to live monitoring: 3 days for discovery + access setup, 4 days for runbook documentation and monitoring deployment, 3 days for senior DBA shadowing your team. Live cover starts on day 14. For the wider data picture, read our blog on how to prevent business data sprawl. Explore the full Managed IT Services pillar to see how DBAaaS fits with our wider operations capability.
Can you provide 24/7 DBA support for production databases?
Yes. Our UK-based DBA team runs follow-the-sun coverage across SQL Server, Oracle, PostgreSQL, MySQL and MongoDB, with named senior engineers on every shift and a contracted rapid median P1 response. We monitor slow queries, lock waits, backup integrity, replication lag and failover health continuously, and we tune indexes and execution plans on a documented quarterly cycle. See a real example in our World Rugby managed IT case study.
Consultation
Book a focused DBA consultation.
A focused conversation with a senior Transputec DBA. We’ll review your database estate, baseline current health, and send you a costed audit, even if we don’t end up working together.
- Database health check across all your engines
- Migration plan with wave-based cutover, zero downtime
- Indicative per-database monthly fee with no surprises
- Prompt reply. ISO 27001 secure handling.